Internet use has become widespread and as a result, many corporations utilize the Internet to conduct at least some portion of their business transactions. Extensible Markup Language (XML), a subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), was designed for use in documents being sent across the Internet. XML allows a computer user to define a structured method of creating text data to be shared by several locations. XML is an example of a formatted text language and is a standard way of sharing structured data that allows the integration of data from multiple sources. It is a text based tag language and the meaning of data is described in the tags which can be accessed by a program. XML tags are placed at the front and at the end of every data element that occurs in a message. The XML tags are typically written so that they are understandable by a system user. This makes it possible for a system user to look at the name of the tag and to determine the type of data associated with the tag. A receiving application must parse, or validate, each character to find the ending delimiter of every data element received. In some cases the same tags may occur hundreds or thousands of times. The use of long form names for the tags increases the amount of time required to process the data and it increases the transmission time.
For example, a corporation may allow a business partner to place orders electronically. Each order placed by the business partner could contain hundreds of part numbers. If the tag for part number is “GlobalPartNumber” then this tag will occur twice for every part number ordered, once at the start of the part number data and once to signal the end of the part number data. An XML message formatted using this tag to identify “9704” as a part number would be as follows: “<GlobalPartNumber>9704</GlobalPartNumber>.” In general, the tag names are defined so that a system user could look at the tag name “GlobalPartNumber” and figure out that the data that follows is a part number. However, the time spent parsing and transmitting the electronic order is increased by this lengthy tag name. Another problem is that the cost of storing the electronic order may be increased because of the extra storage required to store the multiple instances of the tag “GlobalPartNumber.”